The latest review of Gothic 3 is up at GameZilla. The rating is "Not Recommended", with the main complaint being combat:

Quote:

Although the role playing elements work well and the story has plenty of potential, the action part of it is terrible. Itís bad enough to significantly reduce the desire to play all together. My primary compliant is attacking an enemy. Not only is it difficult to tell if you made contact, but the motion lacks any feel that you hit something solid. Other issues like repetitive side missions and the game crashing on occasion make it challenging to appreciate the world created and really dig in and explore it.

it is interesting that the majority of the revies rates this title average at best lately…

Danicek

December 11th, 2006 20:36

Man, the game must be really bad. Why then I'm enjoying it so much? I may be strange being with desire to play terrible games…

ToddMcF2002

December 11th, 2006 21:21

I thought the guy nailed the combat system.

Acleacius

December 11th, 2006 21:24

Mostly its because of the bugs and horrible performance and mostly people don't know they have to go to a tech support forum to find out tweaks to make the game playable.

We only do this becasue we are hardcore fans, I know this may come as a shock. ;)

Jo"Whores Gothic"Wood, doomed Gothic 3 to this treatment instead of the AAA status it deserves.
I don't agree with many of the reviews it's hard not to try to put things in perspective.
Most people like the mass market causal gamers and moderate gamers have proabably never had to edit files.
Honestly I am not sure they should have to edit files, I do but I am a gamer.

Dhruin

December 11th, 2006 22:09

Quote:

Originally Posted by Garrett
(Post 12043)

it is interesting that the majority of the revies rates this title average at best lately…

Why is it interesting?

Wulf

December 12th, 2006 01:42

Picking up on the general content of members posts regarding G3 immersion and depth of gameplay etc' it looks to be the more the hard-core gamers that are less affected by the bugs and problems we read about, just as Acleacius and Danicek mention, the same goes for me.
I am so much immersed that i can barely leave the game alone, it is running beautifully, i am playing for hours on end because there is definately more depth of storyline than first thought.
This seems to suggest that some G3 reviewers (and some players) just don't get the picture, the game is supposed to be a long hard struggle for the protagonist, the redeemer, the decider to conclude against all odds and obtacles put in his way, to percieve the correct finely woven storyline path that is not very apparent to the average player. There are many not-so apparent hints dropped along the way - ignore them and the game becomes almost meaningless or boring and repetitive as some have mentioned.
It is so hard in places that ive had to double-back quite a few times because the true (dare i say) 'deceptive' storyline is almost hidden.

Now if reviewers are not aware of these G3 in game subtleties then they can hardly know just what they are reviewing in the first place and will perhaps have to play the game several times over (or make many saves) in order to understand the games intentions.

So regarding the reviewers quote….. ["Not only is it difficult to tell if you made contact, but the motion lacks any feel that you hit something solid"]
isn't quite exact. Combat as the levels increase become more definate and refined, at L65 i can hear a squash sounds of the sword striking, blood spatter and cries from opponents, sparks fly from skeletons blades when struck, bodies tumbling through the air as they die complete with sounds is not all that bad to me. :)

Corwin

December 12th, 2006 01:43

I agree, we shouldn't HAVE to tweak files before we can play a game properly. That is something the devs should have been able to get correct, at least for the majority of players!!

Danicek

December 12th, 2006 09:37

Hm, I'm playing with acceptable performance with no crashes and with no ini tweaks on mid-higher setting with 3400+, 6800GS and 1024 RAM. I believe the performance is not that bad. They would have done better if they included some load screen instead of caching the world on the fly (which makes the game performance bit worse when (what I suppose is) higher volume of loading is done on the background).

BillSeurer

December 12th, 2006 15:14

Quote:

Originally Posted by Danicek
(Post 12106)

Hm, I'm playing with acceptable performance with no crashes and with no ini tweaks …

Even the buggiest, slowest game in existance will probably not crash and work OK on someone's system. But there really are a LOT of people having trouble when there shouldn't be any (or at least not many).

Gothic 3 was not ready for release and is suffering bad reviews because of it. Whether it will survive and become something respected like Fallout 2 (also horribly buggy at release) or go down in flames like Darklands (ditto) only time will tell.

Danicek

December 12th, 2006 15:57

Quote:

Originally Posted by BillSeurer
(Post 12119)

Even the buggiest, slowest game in existance will probably not crash and work OK on someone's system. But there really are a LOT of people having trouble when there shouldn't be any (or at least not many).

Ok, you are probably right seeing so many negative comments about performance/crashes, there must be a lot of people affected.